Archive

Here it is the complete list of Main Cyber Attacks for July: definitively it looks like the Dog Days did not stop the Cyber Attacks, which have been particularly numerous during August.

Following the trail of July, an attack against PCS Consultants, another U.S Government contractor opened this hot month, even if the controversial shady RAT affair monopolized (and keeps on to monopolize) the infosec landscape (and not only during the first half of the month). Easily predictable nearly every endpoint security vendor (and McAfee competitors) tend to minimize the event considering it only the latest example of RAT based cyber attacks with no particular features (see for instance the comment by Sophos, Kaspersky and Symantec).

Analogously the Dog Days did not stop hactivism with the infamous hacking group Anonymous (and its local “chapters”) author of several attacks in different countries and most of all of author of a kind of arm wrestling against BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), sometimes carried out with questionable methods. Research in Motion was indirectly involved on the Anonymous Campaign during the London Riot, but also Anonymous was hit by (another) defacement attack carried on by Syrian hackers which affected Anonplus, the alternative Social Network.

South Korea was also hit with other massive breaches (involving also Epson Korea) and a defacement against the local branch of HSBC.

According to my very personal estimates, based on the Ponemon Institute indications, the cost for the data breach for which enough information was available, is around $ 126 million mainly due to the impressive Epson Data Breach.

In an interview to Vanity Fair (as to say, information Security is a fashion), a McAfee Security Researcher declares UN and other international institutions have been victims of a large scale Remote Access Tool based attack from a Foreign Country. The attack is dubbed shady RAT and suspects are directed to China.

Anonymous and Colombian Hackers shut down the websites of Colombia’s president, the interior and justice ministry, the intelligence service DAS and the governing party. The hacker attack was meant as a protest against government censorship.

Britain’s Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid The Sun sends a message to readers warning them that computer hackers may have published their data online after an attack on the paper’s website last month. A hacker styled ‘Batteye‘ claims to have posted details taken from The Sun on the Pastebin.

Eight weeks after a hacker cracked its credit card database, the company’s credit card unit in Japan, Citi Card, reported in a message to its user base that “certain personal information of 92,408 customers has allegedly been obtained and sold to a third party illegally.” Estimated cost of the breach is about $19.8 million.

After the first attack to Law Enforcement Institutions in July, Anonymous and LulzSec, as part of what they define the ShootingSheriffsSaturday, leak again 10 Gb of Data from the same Law Enforcement Agencies, including private police emails, training files, snitch info and personal info. The attack was made in retaliation for anonymous arrests

In retaliation for the defacement of the Syrian Ministry of Defence, a Syrian Group of hackers dubbed Syrian Electronic Army, has defaced (for the third time), Anonplus, the alternative Social Network in phase of deployment by Anonymous, posting several gruesome images.

As an (in)direct consequence of the London Riots, a crew of hackers called TeaMp0isoN defaces The Official BlackBerry Blog after RIM has indicated to assist London police, who are investigating the use of the messaging service in organizing riots, with a “very extensive monitoring of the BlackBerry Messenger model”.

As part of Operation Antisec, LulzSec and Anonymous, release 5gb of documents, photos, audio files and videos, exposing that wich was one of the greatest corruption scandals in the recent history of Brazil

The Social Security numbers of 75,000 students and employees at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee arE exposed after hackers planted malware in a campus server.ty-of-wisconsin-server. Estimated Cost of the Breach is $16 million.

The Hong Kong stock exchange (HKEx) halts trading for seven stocks in the afternoon trading session after its website was attacked during the morning trading session. The seven stocks in question were all due to release sensitive results to the website that could impact the price of their stocks. Initially the attack was believed to have compromised the web site. Later it was discovered to be a DDoS.

An hacker called Headpuster, to protest against the sale of user data to a third party operator, hacks Welt.de using an SQL Injection (http://boot24.welt.de/index_welt..php?ac =***) and steals a large amount of data including credit card information of 30,264 users from the database He then publishes censored excerpts. Estimated cost of the breach is around $6.5 million.

The Hong Kong stock exchange comes under attack for the second day in a row on Thursday. The exchange blamed a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against its news web server, hkexnews.hk. A Suspect has been arrested on Aug, the 23rd.

As part of their #OpBART and #Bart-Action in response to a temporary shutdown of cell service in four downtown San Francisco stations to interfere with a protest over a shooting by a BART police officer, Anonymous attacks the myBART.org website belonging to San Francisco’s BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system. They perform a SQL injection (SQLi) attack against the site and extract 2,450 records containing names, usernames, passwords (plain text), emails, phone numbers, addresses and zip codes. Estimated Cost of the Breach is $524,300.

After SK, Another South Korean service provider reports a large-scale data breach of usernames and passwords for subscribers worldwide. This time, it’s the turn of Seoul-based streaming media service GOMTV to suffer a data-spilling intrusion. According to GOM TV, the breach happened early in the morning of Friday 12 August 2011 Korean time; the company sent out a warning email to its subscribers on Sunday 14 August 2011.

Antisec targets Richard Garcia, the Senior Vice President of Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI). During the Breach nearly 4,713 emails and thousands of documents are stolen. The attack has been performed on August the 16th, but, as a consolidated tradtion, the torrent has been released on Friday, August the 19th.

A database belonging to the BART Police Officers Association is hacked, and the names, postal and email addresses of officers are posted online. Over 100 officers are listed in the document posted, as usual, on pastebin. Estimated cost of the breach is $21,400.

The developer forum section of Nokia Website is hacked by Indian Hacker “pr0tect0r AKA mrNRG“. He was able to deface the site and access to email records. According to an official statement from Nokia a “significantly larger” number of accounts has been accessed although they do not contain sensitive information.

Anonymous Hackers upload a file on Torrent containing the snapshot of the Danish Government database of companies. The snapshot was obtained during the summer of 2011 by systematically harvesting data from the public parts of the cvr.dk website.

Hacking in South Korea: After GOMTV.NET Epson Korea is hit by a massive data breach, involving the personal information of 350,000 registered customers. Hackers break into Epson Korea’s computer systems, and steal information including passwords, phone numbers, names, and email addresses of customers who had registered with the company. Estimated cost of the breach is $74,900,000.

@ThEhAcKeR12, an admirer of Anonymous acts independently to breach an outsourced provider and steal a customer list with 20,000 log-in credentials. Many on the list were U.S. government employees. Estimated cost of the breach is around $4,280,000.

As part of the Murder Military Monday, Metropolitan UK Police is hacked for #Antisec by CSL Security using SQL injection Vulnerability and the vulnerable link is also shown on Twitter and pastebin. Other attacked sites include: USarmy.com, GoArmy.com.

F-Secure discovers that on 17th of July, a military documentary program titled “Military Technology: Internet Storm is Coming” was published on the Government-run TV channel CCTV 7, Millitary and Agriculture (at military.cntv. While they are speaking about theory, they actually show camera footage of Chinese government systems launching attacks against a U.S. target.

Division Hackers Crew hacks the Database of Borlas.net (Free SMS Site) and leaks the usernames, Passwords, emails and phone numbers of 14800 registered users. As usual, leaked database has been posted on pastenbin. Estimated cost of the breach is $3,167,200.

A user named alibo on the Gmail forums posts a thread about receiving a certificate warning about a revoked SSL certificate for SSL-based Google services. The certificate in question was issued on July 10th by Dutch SSL certificate authority DigiNotar. The fake certificate was forged by Iranian Hackers, and revoked immediately. This is the second episode of a MITM attack against Google after the Comodo Affair in May.

Another Cyber Attack in South Korea: Gabia a South Korean domain registrar is hacked on Saturday Aug 27, according to a report Monday by the Korea Herald. The hack exposed over 100,000 domains and 350,000 users data. The information included names, user IDS, passwords and registration numbers.

Der Spiegel reports that a WikiLeaks file containing the original leaked US State Department cables has inadvertently been released onto the Internet. The documents have not been edited to protect sources, meaning that the lives of informants could be at risk.

The WikiLeaks website, which contains thousands of U.S. embassy cables, has crashed in an apparent cyberattack. The anti-secrecy organization said in a Twitter message Tuesday that Wikileaks.org “is presently under attack.”

@neatstuffs leaks over 23,000 emails and passwords from a Star Wars Fan Club, and all the passwords are in clear text…sad isnt it? that a website would store so many users information with no security.

Interesting Links

About This Blog

In this blog I express my personal opinion, which does not necessarily reflects the opinion of my organization, about events and news or interest, concerning information security, winking to mobile world and, why not, to some curious personal event.

Every information is reported with its source.

Anyone intending to use the information contained in my posts is free to do so, provided my blog is mentioned in your article.